In this specification, where a document, act or item of knowledge is referred to or discussed, this reference or discussion is not an admission that the document, act or item of knowledge or any combination thereof was at the priority date:                (i) part of common general knowledge; or        (ii) known to be relevant to an attempt to solve any problem with which this specification is concerned.        
The great majority of synthetic organic chemicals, including polymers, pharmaceuticals, herbicides, pesticides, dyes, pigments, and liquid transport fuels are derived from crude petroleum from fossil sources. The reserves of crude petroleum are limited and the majority are located in politically unstable regions of the world. Furthermore, the combustion of petroleum-derived fuels in internal combustion engines has been shown to be a major contributor to the anthropogenic gaseous emissions into the atmosphere (so-called “greenhouse gases”) that have been demonstrated to be the major cause of global climate change. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recommended that all nations work towards reducing emissions of greenhouse gases as soon as possible.
One of the recommended means of reducing emission of greenhouse gases is full, or partial, replacement of petroleum-derived organic compounds such as transport fuels with organic compounds derived from renewable resources, such as plantation forestry, agriculture and aquaculture. This replacement would have the additional advantage of reducing the rate of usage of the limited remaining fossil petroleum reserves and permit their exploitation to be restricted to production of synthetic organic chemicals that cannot be made cost-effectively from renewable resources. With the exception of limited annual supplies of vegetable oils and fats, high volume renewable organic materials that can be harvested in a cost effective manner are generally non-volatile solids. The overwhelming majority of existing internal combustion engines require their fuels to be either volatile organic liquids under ambient pressures and temperatures, or gases that can be condensed into liquids under moderately increased pressures, such as propane and butane.
Many means of converting renewable solid organic materials, into organic liquids, especially volatile, energy-dense organic liquids using thermochemical processing, biochemical processing and/or biological processing, are being actively developed worldwide. The existing means generally have significant disadvantages, especially in relation to the production of useful liquid fuels that are compatible with existing internal combustion engines. These disadvantages include the use of expensive enzymes, the requirement for processing at high pressures, necessitating the use of very large processing facilities with associated high costs associated with transporting bulky renewable organic materials over large collection areas, low net yields of energy, chemical complexity and instability of the liquid products and additional demands for often scarce resources of fresh water.
Thus there is a need to develop means for enabling the most abundant, easily collectible renewable organic materials, namely so called “lignocellulosic materials”, to be converted selectively into organic liquids without the use of high pressure processing and without the need for large volumes of fresh water. Such organic liquids may either be used directly as fuels, or may be subjected to further processing into renewable liquid fuels, polymers, and other organic chemicals using the prior art.
The term “lignocellulosic material” and forms of the term “lignocellulosic material” as used in this description refers to any vegetable matter, wood, or wood product, paper, paperboard, or paper product, yarn, textile, or textile product having a combined cellulose and hemicellulose content above 30% which can act as a raw material for the invention herein described, and includes but is not limited to cellulose fibre, or cellulose powder, woodchips, sawdust, twigs, bark, leaves, seed pods and other forest litter, cereal and grass straws and hays, oilseed straws, sugar cane bagasse, banana pseudostem waste, oil palm waste, general garden waste, algal “cake” derived from aquaculture and other vegetable matter.